Re: Today Linus redesigns the networking driver interface (was Re: tulip driver in ...)

Chris Wedgwood (chris@cybernet.co.nz)
Wed, 23 Sep 1998 12:09:41 +1200


On Wed, Sep 23, 1998 at 01:52:36AM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:

> Well the mac sure cant do 2Mbits.

A cisco box can - with two serial ports (I'm not sure they will keep
up with two 2Mbit ports going hard simulataneously, but it looks
like it should).

> MacOS cheats wholesale to achieve the rest of it. It has the SCC
> chip on a high priority so that it doesnt need masking and even in
> your own drivers if you turn IRQ's off you are supposed to poll
> these magic bits and call functions that basically mean you are
> polling the critical stuff

Oh... not so easy to make work then.

As I said before, I'm not saying it fair to expect a generic linux
kernel on generic hardware work as well as these systems, but since
we have a bigger processor (generally speaking), we can hopefully do
pretty well - and its a goal worth going for IMO.

-cw

P.S. Why is localtalk to time-critical? Its horrendously slow at
best...

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/